The Significance Of Armenia

March 05, 1988

Nagorno-Karabakh, Sumgait and Stepanakert are not names that trip easily off the tongue. Like many strange-sounding places-Ypres, Guernica, Khe Sanh-they become familiar to us only as centers of violent conflict. They are hard to pronounce but their significance, writ large, is easy enough to understand.

For two weeks last month, the ethnic Armenians who predominate in Nagorno-Karabakh (``Black Garden``) rose up in protest against their 65-year separation from Soviet Armenia, only 10 miles away. Most of them are Christian and bitterly resent being tucked away in Azerbaijan, a mostly Moslem and ethnically Turkish region.

We are not talking big numbers here. Nagorno-Karabakh is a remote, arid, mountainous area with only 165,000 people. Its capital, Stepanakert, where the demonstrations began, is about the size of Wheaton. The protest quickly spread to Armenia, bringing out up to a million people in that smallest of the Soviet republics. Counterdemonstrations broke out in Sumgait, a booming Azerbaijani town 150 miles away in the heart of the USSR`s important oil and natural gas exploration program.

The Soviet Communist Party Central Committee reacted quickly, rejecting the demand for transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh back to Armenia. But Mikhail S. Gorbachev did not underestimate the depth and underlying importance of the protests. He issued a plea for calm, sent high-level emissaries to listen to complaints, replaced Nagorno-Karabakh`s Azerbaijani party chief with an Armenian, let a government spokesman make the rare admission that l7 people had died in the riots (there were probably more), and ordered up a commission to look into the problem.

Why all this sudden concern? The simple but often overlooked answer is that the Soviet empire, however evil, is fundamentally disjointed. Repeated protests in Soviet Central Asia and in the Baltics illustrate its unnatural, crazyquilt political reality. It is a patchwork of warring ethnic strains, capriciously stitched together at gunpoint and restive under Slavic masters.

Russians constitute only 51.5 percent of the USSR`s population. That is expected to slip to 49 percent by the end of the century. The implications-and resulting headaches-of that simple statistic are enormous.

Continuing ethnic unrest in the USSR demonstrates Mr. Gorbachev`s internal problems, already aggravated by severe economic instability. The Soviet leader`s need to reach accommodations with the United States on controlling the expensive arms race is evident. He calls it glasnost and perestroika-openness and restructuring. In English, it looks more like desperation.

But Mr. Gorbachev is not a one-man act. The speedy rejection of Nagorno-Karabakh`s plea to reunite with Armenia shows that in any direct

confrontation, hardline elements in the Communist leadership will dig in their heels. For U.S. leaders now and in future administrations, there is a double challenge in dealing with the USSR: See it clearly for what it is and is not, free from kneejerk rhetoric, and determine the best, safest ways to capitalize on that knowledge.